religious freedom

After a week of intense lobbying by Western governments for his release, Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity, arrived in Italy, where he received political asylum.

The U.S. State Department has for the first time included Saudi Arabia on a list of “countries of particular concern” for not allowing religious freedom—a potential stumbling block for relations between the U.S. and its Persian Gulf ally.

Turkey advertises itself both as “secular,” thanks to its constitution of 1923, and as “98 percent Muslim.” India is called “secular,” thanks to its constitution of 1947, and is often seen as having the highest level of religious participation of any major nation.

Christians in the U.S. often worry about the nation’s “secularism” and the attendant privatizing of religion. While it’s true that the U.S. is not officially religious, and there are many forces that lead people to treat faith as merely a private matter, the country’s political tradition and constitutional framework do not demand such a result.

In the wake of the terrorist fury unleashed by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic al-Qaeda organization on September 11, Western analysts have been scrambling to analyze the competing ideologies that have brought about a violent collision between two cultures.